Whenever I think to the word antibiotics I find myself humming this phrase by Alanis.
Of course, antibiotics are a phase from which we all hope to get out quickly.
What maybe not everyone knows, is that pharmaceutical companies, or more specifically investors, do not consider convenient anymore to invest in the research necessary to fight the new bacteria that have become resistant, since the economic return is small.
Sick people take antibiotics for a week at most.
Much more profitable to address to other types of medicines that treat patients for years, without eliminating the disease, such as medicines for diabetes.
In addition, manufacturers are experiencing problems due precisely to the ineffectiveness of antibiotics designed to defeat infections that can no longer eradicate fungi and bacteria that have developed defenses against medicines following decades of overuse.
Ironically, bacteria evolve more intelligently than we do.
It will be that they still have survival at heart, but we only are slaves to money.
Can you figure Fleming while being told that it is not economically convenient to continue researching his penicillin?
In reality, there is little to laugh: as reported by the New York Times, pharmaceutical giants such as Novartis have left the sector while other companies are bordering on insolvency.
Antibiotic start-ups have gained weight in recent times but an example of the situation may be the 15 years and above all the billion dollars used to approve and insert a medicine against urinary tract infections among essential. Sadly emblematic numbers.
In the past, scientists with modest means managed to obtain stunning results, in the past twenty years, only two new classes of antibiotics have been introduced, the rest are variations of existing drugs.
I am referring to the research data of the New York Times, the research situation in Italy is sad. While it was a researcher and medical officer of the Italian Navy who first understood the bactericidal power of some molds. Vincenzo Tiberio sensed a connection between the water taken from a well on whose walls there was a layer of mold, and the subsequent use of water from the same well once the walls were cleaned, managing to demonstrate the therapeutic action of some substances contained in molds.
Guess what: I feel like we have ended up at the bottom of the water well, and that the water is not clean.